The Rebels of Gold (Loom Saga #3)(60)
“And why would we want that?”
Florence forced herself to sigh mentally, rather than heaving it outward in frustration. “Because we are relatively protected here. And as long as we don’t go showing our faces, or get careless, the Dragons will know where we are but not how to get to us. The Rivets’ Guild, on the other hand, is not so fortunate.”
“We must get a message to them.” Gregory had finally caught up with her logic. “I believe Vicar Dove has a means to communicate.”
Florence sincerely hoped so, because if they didn’t, there was a real possibility that Garre could still fall.
Arianna
Arianna didn’t know what to do with herself when nothing was going catastrophically wrong.
The peace was nearly unnerving. Whenever it became too much for her, she retreated to Master Oliver’s quarters and tinkered with the various projects, the original intentions of which she could only guess. She had yet to figure out how to contact Florence unnoticed about the gun schematics Oliver had been working on. Her solo attempts to complete his renderings only yielded uncertain results.
A Revolver’s insight on the mechanics of weaponry would be imperative to finishing her late master’s great work. Still, she continued to hope against hope that she would find some way to communicate with Florence privately, rather than involving all the vicars and half the remaining Revolvers.
Arianna wiped soot off her hands from the charcoal pencil she preferred for drafting schematics. It was a pointless gesture, as she was just about to head down to the factory floor that had occupied most of her time in the past week. The factory bustled along with all the impressive noise of a fully operating manufacturing line, but any Rivet who looked upon it would know that it was anything but.
They were grossly understaffed for the technical nature of what they were trying to produce. The tooling workshops had only completed one out of three specialized machines required. And while she had heard from Victor Willard that more Rivets were on the way, Arianna didn’t want to sit on her hands and wait.
So, every day she went down to the factory floor to meet the other journeymen and initiates who had stayed when everyone else had departed for Ter.0.
When she was younger, every initiate of the Rivets’ Guild was required to spend a certain amount of time on the factory floor each week. Young Rivets were taught the basics of their trade, and learned that essential quality of a tinkerer: humility. Working the floor inspired respect for how things can come together with elegant sophistication.
But the pedagogy had been abandoned in the wake of the Dragons.
Young men and women—children, really—with soft delicate hands, who had never seen a manufacturing line before, stood before Arianna each day at dawn. Each day, she critiqued their work from the day prior. Even though they had yet to produce a fully functional Philosopher’s Box to her specifications, she permitted the better prototypes a place of honor on the shelves along the back wall of the factory for a day or two before getting dismantled and smelted. The gesture served both as an opportunity to raise the spirits of her workers and function as a red herring for Louie. Arianna had no doubt that upon seeing all the yet-imperfect boxes lined up on the shelves the other day, Louie immediately assumed the Rivets were further along in production than they actually were.
It was this assumption that she would use against him. For if knowledge of stockpiled Philosopher’s Boxes was to make its way to any third party, Arianna would know immediately who the false information came from. It wasn’t as though any of the initiates spoke to Louie; Arianna had gleaned great pleasure so far at seeing the haughty man on the edge of all interactions, never able to penetrate closer.
She glanced up at the catwalk where Louie had appeared the other day. Today, like most days, it was empty. Arianna put it from her mind to focus on the floor. The boxes wouldn’t become perfect with her mind busy elsewhere.
They worked until lunch, breaking to head to the mess hall on the floor above.
The food wasn’t glamorous, but it was consistent, and it was what Arianna was accustomed to from her childhood.
“It seems like you’re doing well with them.” Charles sat across from her, startling Arianna from her thoughts. He usually sat with the young Rivets.
“With Louie?” Arianna couldn’t imagine what about her relationship with Louie looked remotely positive, let alone qualified as “doing well.” It was a sort of peaceful tolerance on the exterior, at best.
“No, no.” Charles shook his head as if remembering for the first time in days that the skeletal man and his ragtag followers even existed. “I mean with the initiates. They’re doing well learning the line. It’s something that many were resistant to, but now they’re all taking a liking for it.”
Arianna scoffed softly, and refrained from making a comment about how “in her day” all initiates were required to spend time on the line. Instead, she capitalized on the fact that she had someone familiar with what had evolved in the Rivets’ Guild while she was away.
“Why is it that the initiates don’t work on the line anymore?”
“Ah, that . . . That was a change the Dragons imposed about six years ago. They wanted most initiates focused on refining.” Charles shook his head, expressing in a single gesture that he felt much the same as Arianna on the matter.
“Shortsighted creatures,” she muttered. The Dragons had the most use for gold, and they put high value on the difficult-to-craft resource. Converting all manpower to its creation made sense. It was, after all, nearly impossible to produce without a lot of time and manpower.